New ideas fuel anxiety as parents expect more from their children and educators

Disconnect between what parents, teachers expect children to learn grows

More than 7,000 academics are gathered in Victoria, B.C., this week for the annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, presenting papers on everything from what we learn about healthcare from Grey’s Anatomy to Justin Trudeau’s political brand power. In this week-long series, the National Post showcases some of the most interesting research.

Krista Chau knows her expectations are high.

When she sends her four-year-old son Maddox to public school kindergarten in September, she wants her little boy — who can already write his name, is learning the sounds of letters and beginning to add and subtract — to flourish into a confident reader. She wants him to learn patterns with math and how to problem solve. She hopes he doesn’t lose the little bit of French he’s already picked up at Childventures Early Learning Academy in Vaughan, Ont., where Ms. Chau is director.

“Part of my fear is knowing about play-based learning,” she said, referring to the new approach that emphasizes social interaction as part of a more flexible, low-key way of easing kids into school, one of several new concepts gaining traction in education circles.

“Some of the things he’s learned now … is he going to lose all of that?”

The teachers she “drilled” at kindergarten orientation assured her he would not.

But Ms. Chau is not the only one feeling some anxiety as recent changes to kindergarten — still transitioning to all-day in Ontario and British Columbia — and the challenges of modern child-rearing ratchet parents’ expectations of what their children will learn ever higher. Meanwhile, as teachers work to introduce the new kindergarten curriculum that focuses on “21st-century learning,” their expectations of what children will learn — and how they will learn — have shifted too.

This growing disconnect between what parents and teachers expect children will learn in their first year of school is highlighted in research to be presented this week at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, a massive gathering of more than 7,000 academics at the University of Victoria.

Play-based learning has a role in this. It’s part of the new curricular movement toward “21st-century learning” that considers “early literacy” to be anything from which the child draws meaning in the world and learns to communicate it with others. “When kids are playing with blocks and they’re talking with each other and working out their problems, that is actually literacy,” said Kari-Lynn Winters, assistant professor of teacher education at Brock University.

Their small-scale study, titled “Won’t She Learn that in Kindergarten?” gathered perspectives from 24 teachers and 11 university-educated parents (all female) from three school boards in southwestern Ontario, asking them how they defined literacy, what specific literacy practices kids are exposed to at home and what they expected children to learn in kindergarten.

Their answers revealed very different perspectives.

“Parents wanted their children to succeed in a holistic way,” said Prof. Winters, who conducted the research with colleague Debra Harwood. “They wanted their children to have access to every kind of advantage, whether that means access to French speaking opportunities, technology, whether that means access to print literacies and books — all of it, that’s what parents wanted. They want their kids to be critical thinkers, to be humane people and to be successful in their lives.”

Meanwhile, the teachers wanted more “skill-based kinds of ideas” — for the children to be academically successful, to read at a higher level, to understand the world in a less literal way, she said. These values didn’t always pan out in practice, they said — for example, teachers tended to teach these skills in more “traditional” ways.

Researchers also noted that while children were exposed to literacy via technology at home (on iPads and computers), that happened a lot less at school, despite the value placed on 21st-century learning.

As society has become more child-centric, and the world an ever more competitive place, parents like Ms. Chau are preparing their children academically before they even hit kindergarten. That’s a shift teachers and schools have had to keep up with, said Prof. Harwood, co-researcher and professor of early childhood education at Brock.

“If you look at the history of curriculum … the Grade 1 curriculum has been pushed down to the kindergarten level, so parents do have that expectation that in kindergarten they will be taught to read, write, communicate the critical things,” she said.

There’s a “huge spectrum of thinking” when it comes to play-based learning too, she said, with “some parents highly valuing the role of play and learning while others not really understanding the connections.”

Parents tend to think back to their own experience in school and try to do everything they can to improve on it with their own children, said Marilyn Chapman, director of the Institute for Early Child Education and Research at the University of British Columbia. It’s often a challenge to help parents understand these “expanding notions of literacy in the 21st century,” which includes play-based learning, she said.

“One of the things that was a deliberate choice with the full day kindergarten program was not to say, ‘OK kids are going to be in full day kindergarten so now they’re going to be farther ahead in their reading.’ What we’re trying to do is build a rich foundation so that ultimately they will be farther ahead in their reading, but it may not show until after kindergarten,” she said. “One of the things we know is that if we try to hurry kids up, it can cause an awful lot of anxiety…. Parents may feel uncomfortable when a child writes something in phonetic spelling and it’s not spelled correctly. They may feel, ‘Oh the child is learning this wrong.’”

While many parents are delighted to see their kindergarten and early primary school children delving into chapter books, picture books are actually beneficial for helping kids connect images with text — a huge demand in a world of flashy billboards and websites, Prof. Winters said. Exposing children to a larger vocabulary without worrying about the proper spelling might pay dividends once they get to Grade 3, said Prof. Chapman. Because of this exposure, she said, students are spelling most words correctly by then.

Robyn Thompson, a mother of two in Oakville, Ont., said she felt a bit of “disappointment” over what was taught in kindergarten versus what she had to teach her son at home. Her youngest son, Zac, 5, will graduate from senior kindergarten this spring, a program that runs all day, every other day.

“I thought he’d be able to read with confidence, would be taught spelling and proper handwriting,” she said. “Of course you have the social stuff you want — I do think they delivered on that front in terms of interaction and sharing. But when it comes to more academic stuff — the reading, the writing, the printing — I don’t think they ever teach that.”

She remembers doing little spelling tests in kindergarten, tiny words like cat and dog, learning the days of the week. Her son, she said, has no real concept of the calendar, and so she tries to teach a lot of this stuff at home.

Social pressure is strong, after all.

“I have a lot of friends with kids in Montessori and private school, you can’t help but compare your child. When you’re in the park and you see Suzy reading books but your son is not at the same level, you get nervous and concerned,” she said. “University’s a long way away, but there are limited spots. Certainly you don’t want to think your child’s falling behind.”